Writing Beyond High School

Since 2014, I have done something adventurous with my son on New Year’s Day because I believe that a new year should begin at the end of your comfort zone. This year, we went to a state neither of us had been to before: Texas.

While we were there, we went on a student-led tour of The University of Texas at Austin. The tour was comprehensive, and one of our last stops on it was at the campus’s University Writing Center—a stop that piqued my interest.

As we stood in front of the center, our tour guide, a sophomore college student, was lamenting about how she spends a lot of time at the writing center because she chose a major that requires a lot of writing, and she is not very good at it. She went on to tell us that “college papers are much harder to write than high school ones.”

Her words resonated with me because I occasionally have students who think they have learned how to write well independently after completing a few papers with me and/or receiving good grades on rudimentary papers for school. Unfortunately, those students have no idea that most of the future writing tasks that lie ahead for them, both at college and beyond, will be harder than those they have completed. They also don’t know that they will likely be underprepared for those tasks and, thus, dependent on others (e.g., volunteers and employees at tutoring centers) to help them complete them.

Inadequate writing skills always catch up to people—it is just a matter of when. To help your middle or high school child avoid finding out in college that they have a lot more to learn about writing than they thought they did, encourage them to prioritize writing now while they have time to do so. Also, encourage them to prepare themselves for writing assignments that will be more challenging than the ones they have had and for instructors who will grade those assignments with higher standards than they are accustomed to.

~ Christina Caputo

Founder & Owner of ★ W O R D S